Brahms in the Mountains

Brahms in the Mountains

Brahms in the Mountains Table of Contents Page 4. A Note to Our Friends Page 7. The Program Page 8. Brahms in the Mountains Page 18. The Intermezzi Page 24. Johannes, Robert, and Clara Page 38. Clara’s Andantino Page 42. Silence in Brahms’s E-flat Intermezzo Page 54. Playing the Notes Page 62. Intermezzo, Op. 117, No. 2 Page 68. The Brahms Piano Page 75. “Concert” (poem) Page 76. Bio and Discography Page 78. Technical Specifications Page 82. FAQ

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A Note to Our Friends At this time, when we need to be reassured more than ever, when we dig deeper into our diversions, we hope that these more detailed versions of concerts and recording sessions will offer some comfort.

These initial tracks will grow over time to include pieces by John Luther Adams, Michael Brown, Roman Rabinovich, Adam Golka, Julien Brocal, and others.

You can download them with a click and listen to them when you’re in the mood. Headphones will reveal hidden aspects of the music; adding a converter will expand what you can hear even more.

We hope the many other offerings on our site will send your imaginations in multiple directions, and remind us all how special the real experiences were, and will be.

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Schumann Romanze

Brahms Intermezzo in A Minor, Op. 116, No. 2 Intermezzo in E Major, Op. 116, No. 4 Intermezzo in E Major, Opus 116, No. 6 Intermezzo in E-flat Major, Op. 117, No. 1 Intermezzo in B-flat Minor, Op. 117, No. 2 Intermezzo in C-sharp Minor, Op. 117, No. 3 Intermezzo in A Major, Op. 118, No. 2 Intermezzo in F Minor, Op. 118, No. 4 Romanze in F Major, Op. 118, No. 5 Intermezzo in E Minor, Op. 119, No. 2 Brahms in the Mountains 7

Brahms in the Mountains Romantic composers, true to their school, lived in the musical capitals of Europe: Berlin, Leipzig, Bonn, Vienna, London, Paris.

But they often composed during the summer, when they escaped the overheated musical circus of the cities for mountain lakes or alps. You can hear those mountains in their music.

Sometimes it is obvious, as when Mahler wrote a program for his Third Symphony, calling the first movement, for instance, “What the Stony Mountains Tell Me.” Strauss composed in a large villa at Garmisch-Partenkirchen, near Germany’s highest mountain, the Zugspitze. Nietzsche’s character Zarathustra retreats to the mountains for 10 years to meditate on the future of humanity.

Mahler had three composing huts, the first at Steinbach am Attersee, on Lake Atter outside Salzburg, under the cliffs of the Höllengebirge, whose surroundings he embedded in his symphonies. The other two were in Maiernigg (to the south, on the Wörthersee), and in Toblach (now Dobbiaco).

Grieg had his composing hut with its turf roof on Nordåsvannet, Nordås Lake, just down the lawn from his house, Troldhaugen, troll knoll. It is south of Bergen in Vestland on the west coast of Norway. Bergen is a maritime port set on the edge of an archipelago of hills, fjords, and lakes which filter out to the North Sea. Or sometimes it was just the tundra itself, as with Rachmaninoff and Nabokov.

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In 1932 Rachmaninoff built the Bauhaus-like Villa Senar near Hertenstein on the shores of Lake Lucerne in Switzerland.

He lived there until 1939, just before World War II. Here he wrote the exotic Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini, his last genuinely Russian piece, because Senar reminded him of Russia. Bunin and Horowitz visited. It is owned today by Vladimir Putin, and contains one of the composer’s pianos and many of his scores. Putin invites many of Russia’s notable pianists to play there.

Senar reminded Rachmaninoff of Ivanovka, the bucolic Russian estate which he inherited from his cousins, the Satins, and on which he lavished the proceeds from his concert career.

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Rachmaninoff was taken in when he was 16 by the Satins, who provided the lively family he always longed for, and eventually left him, the great prodigy and hope for the future, their estate. He had become their heir. Sonya Satina, who was 10 at the time, wrote of the estate: The small village of Ivanovka adjoined our estate. Endless fields stretched around us, merging on the horizon with the sky. In the distance, in the west, the belfry of our parish church, located five miles from Ivanovka, was visible. In the north is someone’s windmill, to the east is nothing but fields, and to the south is our aspen forest. For many miles around Ivanovka, these aspen trees and our garden near the house were the only trees among the fields, and therefore this aspen tree was a refuge for hares, foxes, and even wolves sometimes....

When Rachmaninoff abandoned Russia during the Revolution, he left a large fund behind for the serfs at Ivanovka. He always treated them generously and amicably. Nevertheless, they burnt it to the ground. Rachmaninoff was shocked. It was later rebuilt.

Vladimir Nabokov has written eloquently of his own idyllic childhood in the Russian countryside in Speak, Memory, the greatest autobiography in literature. Brilliantly reviewing it himself in 1950 (although The New Yorker didn’t publish it until December 21, 1998), Nabokov wrote: The summers, spent by the author as a boy in the country, seem to have been especially responsible for shaping him. The region, with its scattered villages among great forests and marshes, was meagerly populated, but numerous ancient footpaths (the mysterious trails that webbed the whole Empire from immemorial times) kept the berry gatherer, the tramp, the squire’s pretty children from losing themselves in the woods. And because Brahms in the Mountains 11

most of those ways and the wastes they passed by or led to were nameless, landowning families, from generation to generation, designated them by the names that under the influence of French governesses and tutors had naturally come into being during the children’s daily promenades and frequent picnics—Chemin du Pendu, Pont des Vaches, Amérique, and so on.

Brahms was more subtly influenced by the time he spent every summer among the mountains, the great mountain lakes, and the high mountain alps. His pieces weren’t sententious, like Zarathustra’s trumpet calls. But the intermezzos were like nothing else written to that date.

They weren’t dreaming night pieces, like Chopin’s Nocturnes, or horse rides like Liszt’s “Mazeppa.” They weren’t works of pure structure, like Bach or Beethoven. They weren’t program music, like Berlioz.

They were emotional explosions tightly controlled by structure, radiating folk music and Clara’s descending motif. They were unobtrusive explorations of harmony, but not the harmonies of childhood or descriptions of personalities, as Debussy’s would be.

They were intangibly colored by stillness, by ominous yet lightly tinged sunset clouds, by mountain streams, by expanding visions of growing clarity.

They didn’t come from Bach, or Chopin, or Beethoven. They were pure Brahms, refined from the symphonies and the concertos, always framing Clara’s theme, which never becomes tiresome or obvious.

They have a freshness, a subtle sense of the brisk mountain air. Nothing is exaggerated. Small nuances color the chords, but with the ripple of a clear stream. Not a blizzard, but flurries at sunset. The smell of wood fires burning quietly in an Austrian hut.

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Before Brahms settled in Pörtschach am Wörthersee, a lakeside spa in Austria, where he would take long walks around the lake and on the wooded slopes, he would walk for weeks in the summer, exploring the enchanting mountain villages of Austria. He pinned a sign on his knapsack, Frei aber Einsam, free but lonely. It was the motto of Joseph Joachim, the great Hungarian violinist. Brahms and Schumann later wrote a sonata for him that they called the F-A-E Sonata.

Brahms trekked with his father through Styria and Carinthia in the Austrian Alps; he was excited to show his father the area and climb mountains, such as the Hochschwab, on the side. He would stay at houses on mountain lakes and compose there: Mürzzuschlag in Styria, Hofstetten on Lake Thun, Bad Ischl in the Salzkammergut region, a fashionable spa where the Kaiser kept a summer lodge and half of Vienna showed up in the summer.

Johann Strauss also had a villa in Bad Ischl, which was known as the Austrian Baden-Baden.

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There Brahms rented a farmhouse above a confluence of two rivers with an excellent view down the steep valley. Again, he would take long walks in the hills. He stayed in Bad Ischl for 16 summers.

In 1863 Clara had bought a small summer house (her children called it “the kennel”) in Lichtental, a suburb of the real Baden-Baden. Her garden backed on the river Oos. The following year Brahms visited Anton Rubinstein in his rented villa there. Baden-Baden was by then the most fashionable summer resort in Europe, filled with the mansions of royalty and the Großbürgertum, the newly emerging merchant class, who had more money than the aristocracy and smaller names in need of burnishing. The diva Pauline Viardot, whom Turgenev visited, lived there. Johann Strauss kept a grand villa there as well as at Ischl. Both Mahler and Alban Berg spent time there.

In 1865 Brahms rented his own summer sanctuary, which he called “the beautiful house on the hill.” He regarded the mountain view as “unsurpassable.”

After a feast in the local stube, he would stop under the window of his friends the Simrocs and whistle Don Giovanni’s serenade, which the Don sings to Zerlina, a maid he is trying to seduce with a typical impromptu balcony aria. Brahms was much amused by his running joke, and annoyed if no one came to the window to applaud or sing along.

But if all these wandering paths come to a mountainous point, it is that the strange storm light at high altitudes, the Brocken shadows which distend trees into giants, the primal moss and lichens of the agrarian alps themselves, meadows separated from time and culture by the Gothic chasms of Caspar David Friedrich, of Albert Bierstadt, of Thomas Moran, by the photos of Gaston Rébuffat, Joseph Tairraz, Lionel Terray, by Thomas Mann in The Magic Brahms in the Mountains 15

Mountain, G.W. Young’s On High Hills, Arnold Lunn’s The Swiss and Their Mountains, where new vocabularies had to be invented for the spectral phenomena of shape and light encountered for the first time by the Victorian explorers, by the Gothic fantasists of Austrian mountain passes and forgotten Nepalese valleys, phantasms that were real but needed fiction in order to be excused their excesses— these influences reflect the facets of the thin light, the purl of brooks through wildflower ravines, the discovery of new, alien worlds during Brahms’s time through whose paintings and librettos his intermezzos ripple like sun glinting off séracs, and without whose fresh murmurs the undulant descants of these exotic forms, these intermezzos, would be only shapeless reflections.

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The Intermezzi There are many sides of Brahms: the early waltz king of the 16 Waltzes and the Liebeslieder

Waltzes; the magisterial prophet of A German Requiem, the two concertos, and the four symphonies; the Lisztian virtuoso of the Paganini Variations and the rhapsodies; and the wistful philosopher of the last songs and the intermezzi.

I have chosen 10 of the latter, possibly because of their touching on the yearning, the Sehnsucht, the twilight of the Habsburgs in doomed Vienna, when children would tumble in the Prater, in the half-light of Empire, midges amber in the setting sun, ducks swanning on the Danube, parasols side lit by the real-life Götterdämmerung, by the miniature apocalypse of each last day when beauty was in the air, before the wars took it all away and brought in the modern world.

It was 20 years before World War I, but the shards of the crumbling empire were in the air.

Composers, poets, writers, and painters always sense things as they’re building up to events which history then documents. But before that, the aura in the air, the tension in the coffeehouses, the increasing brusqueness in the streets and frustration in the papers, all dramatically foreshadow the times which sluggish historians write about three decades too late. Although you can capture the atmosphere in Proust, or in the lyric histories of Frederic Morton, such as A Nervous Splendor: Vienna 1888–1889, you should play the Brahms intermezzi as you read, for the full effect.

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In that light I have included the 1849 Romanze by Robert Schumann to introduce the carousel and the swing set, to summon up the gilded height of the Romantic Era in 1849, the centenary of Goethe’s death, when Chopin and Liszt were changing the musical world in Paris, and Schumann had moved to the small village of Kreischa to avoid the Dresden insurrection.

1848 had brought the greatest wave of democratic revolutionary fervor in history, in France, Germany, Austria, the Netherlands, and Italy. Schumann must have sensed his world falling apart, in his deteriorating mind, in the chaos of the widespread riots. Even small changes in the order of the objects around us, paint disturbed on the houses, cafés where they’ve never been, can disorient us and strangify the world, so we begin having visions rather than the usual protected views under the sheltering sky. Paintings are imprisoned in museums to lock out the world, to preserve their lost dreams. It won’t do for art to get loose.

Brahms used the hanging note, the suspended resolution, the unresolved harmony, the unanswered question to leave his chords and passages in limbo for a while before they returned home to their underlying “tonic” key.

In the meantime, they modulate far afield, like Tom Jones, Joseph Andrews, Gulliver, 20 Brahms in the Mountains

Don Quixote, Tristram Shandy, or Richard Feverel—early episodic, picaresque adventurers.

Notes also have their lives, their adventures, their freedom, before they are roped home by the composer. (Chopin’s improvisations were much freer and more brilliant than the eventual sheds and palaces into which he chose to bend them.)

Brahms’s “leading” tones were cliffhangers, ways of postponing the instant harmonic gratification which tradition demands. We are all programmed to expect a chord to resolve into a comforting, reassuring base, and when it doesn’t, our world becomes dark, unsure, terrifying. We all understand the angst of unrequited love, the grief of delayed happiness, and our hearts go out to all such men without a country, notes without a key.

Schumann’s Romanze has the same unresolved notes. Brahms studied Schumann, with whom he boarded, as a man and as a composer before he dared to begin showing his early compositions to Clara. Since Clara was the source and the muse for Robert’s music, she was the ideal mentor for Brahms as well.

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It is the mythologic longing for the eternal return of spring (what the poet Paul Muldoon has abridged to the “slight return” of the poet to his naive native land), the spring of Persephone risen from the winter, Finnegan rising from the dead, the sun god Amen-Ra emerging from his nightly trip through the underworld, which informs our ingrained need for a happy ending to our songs.

Added to that structural anguish is the “Clara” theme. Clara wrote it, Schumann adapted it as a private homage to Clara in many of his pieces, and Brahms improved on it in his own works, most audibly in the intermezzi. Four downward-traveling notes (which can be shortened to two or enlarged to seven), like Berlioz’s idée fixe or Tristan’s love theme, become a motif which summons up regret, lost love, the lost youth of Proust, the lost kingdom of the magnificent Meaulnes, Nabokov’s and Rachmaninoff’s lost Russia, the lost kingship of the Earl of Oxford, anyone’s lost dreams and faded ideals. So emotion can be encoded into melodies.

The descent of Brahms’s “Clara” theme suggests depression, a decline into madness or hell, the melancholy of a Scottish or Irish song which mourns the countryside lost to the English, or the illusions of youth lost to age.

We all see the lawns of our childhood as enormous; when we come back to them as adults we see them in perspective, without the mythologies we created as children, and often the “reality” is quite disappointing.

If the dreams of childhood, which age and accidents have stripped away from our souls, are the real “reality,” we can have them back again, endlessly, in the time machine of the waltzes, the idylls, the empires invoked and evolved by Brahms’s lost chords.

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Johannes, Robert, and Clara The story of Brahms begins with Robert and Clara Schumann. Clara had written a theme when she was young, five descending notes in the Lento or slow section of her Romances variées, which later her husband Robert reshaped into what he called the Andantino and integrated into many of his compositions.

The Clara theme became a major building block for many of Robert’s pieces and, later, for the intermezzi of Johannes Brahms (you can listen to a podcast about this love triangle and its musical consequences at https://tippetrise.org/podcasts/peter-at-the-piano-robert-schumannsclara-theme).

My concert starts with this Romanze, written nine years after Robert met Clara. It wouldn’t be until the end of his life that a third musical genius, Johannes Brahms, would weave that Romanze into his greatest compositions. It was not only a title, that Romanze; it was the greatest romance in the history of music, spread out over the lifetimes of three supreme masters. Their contributions to the history of Western society have since been diluted in the ocean of music which has surged around us over the last 60 years, but during their lifetimes they were at the heart of what it meant to be not only brilliant, but coruscating.

Clara’s Romance variée in C Major, Op. 3, written in 1833, when she was 14, has a Lento a piacere movement with theme and variations, which Robert Schumann turned into the Quasi variazione, the slow movement of his Piano Sonata No. 3. When Brahms came into their household, he understood how this theme had become the catalyst around which much of their music spun, and it began to incubate in him until it burst out, burning, 40 years later in his last, intense manifesto of passion, shame, and contrition, bundled up around that same simple theme.

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Although Brahms began writing his intermezzi as early as 1879, the majority of them began to appear 40 years after he met Clara. His last four collections, mainly of intermezzi, were written in 1892 and 1893; three years later, Clara would be dead; a year after that, Brahms would be dead.

He and Clara would play the intermezzi together in those last three years of her life, renewing their passion through the many ways Brahms integrated Robert Schumann’s love theme (four descending notes), based on Clara’s variations, into every intermezzo. Although Brahms and Clara were entirely platonic, it was she who made his reputation and who inspired so much of his music. She was the only person he ever really loved, the only person he could talk to, although they went for many years pursuing enormous careers apart from each other.

Schumann and Clara had been madly in love, ever since Schumann came to tutor her in her family home when she was 11. In exchange, her father taught Robert composition. It is hard to believe that either Clara or Robert required much tutelage; education the mask under which many carnivals happened. If anything, they tutored each other.

Clara had given her debut public recital at the age of nine. That same year she met Robert Schumann at a concert she gave at the Leipzig house of the director of the mental hospital at Colditz Castle, later a high security dungeon for foreign soldiers who had broken out of other German prisons. They broke out of Colditz as well, later the subject of a book by Pat Reid, one of the British escapees, and a film starring John Mills (father of Hayley) and Eric Portman (Soames in The Forsyte Saga of 1967, the first viral TV series, so popular that no one went out on Saturday nights, when it was broadcast).

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Schumann admired Clara so much that he asked her father, Friedrich Wieck, if he could study with him. As so often happened in those days, the pupil was mentored fully by the master— tutelage came with room and board, and Schumann moved into Wieck’s house in 1830, when he was 20. Schumann was nine years older than Clara; it was her talent, and her aura, which convinced him to give up the law and pursue music.

He and Clara began a platonic relationship, which culminated in their marriage in 1840.

(Before that transpired, Wieck had forced Clara to break off with Schumann, who was briefly engaged to Ernestine von Fricken.)

But in 1837 Robert asked Wieck for Clara’s hand, which Wieck refused. Robert and Clara ultimately sued her father for permission to marry. They married one day before she turned 21, to make the point to Robert’s former teacher that they didn’t actually need his permission.

Those were fraught years in music, when the greatest achievements of Western society sprung from the bedroom farces captured much later by Arthur Schnitzler in his 1897 banned play, Reigen. 1897 was the year it was all over. Brahms died that year. It was incidentally the year in which the piano, Seraphina, which I’m using to record the Brahms intermezzi, was built. The affairs of Reigen were cynical liaisons, callous affairs, while the love of both Schumann and Brahms for Clara Wieck was the quintessence of innocent romance.

At that time, musicians, writers, poets, and painters were the focus of Europe; they composed the body of the culture which America later came to regard as the canon, the standard against which all future art has been judged. This was partly because of World War II, which drove the European intelligentsia to America, where they taught in liberal arts colleges for the next 40 years, shaping the curve of knowledge.

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But both World Wars were born out of the failure of empire, that indeterminate disintegration sprung from boredom with a frivolous society and the human need for change. Social unrest has been traced to class inequalities, to new philosophies of government such as Marxism, to the birth of the unconscious with Freudianism, to atonality in music. But possibly all those causes are in fact effects of what André Malraux called “la condition humaine.”

Despite Wieck’s feeling that Schumann was too unstable to succeed, Schumann was to become the greatest German composer between Beethoven and Brahms, and Clara the greatest pianist of her age throughout her six-decade career.

Brahms, who was to become Robert’s protégé, came to live with the Schumanns in 1853, when he was 20. Clara was 34, and Robert was 43.

Schumann had also been 20 when he moved into Wieck’s house to become his protégé. Brahms and Schumann both understood each other’s genius, and both idolized Clara as a person and as a pianist.

Wieck was right about Schumann’s instability, and in 1854, after trying to drown himself in the Rhine (an alternative he had been considering for many years), Schumann committed himself to a sanatorium in Bonn. From that day on, Clara never saw him again, except the day he died.

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On that day she was 36, and Brahms was 22.

A sanatorium was in a way an ivory tower from which people could coddle their genius at a safe distance from the slings and arrows of demanding soirées and salons. Resorts were in a way the last resort, where abandoned and fragile people, shunted aside by families, rode out their lives until death or a new resolve took them.

Many patients had undiagnosable diseases; in Schumann’s case, later critics have called it psychotic melancholia (which writers and composers probably need to distance themselves enough from life to create), vascular dementia (strokes brought on by hypertension), schizophrenia, syphilis, bipolar disorder, and so on.

Richard Kogan, in Music and the Mind: The Life and Works of Robert Schumann, felt that Schumann’s vast piece, Carnaval, with its schizophrenic narrators, Florestan and Eusebius, “could not have been written by someone who did not suffer from bipolar disorder.” (The descendants of madmen were often at pains to solicit medical diagnoses after the fact about their insane forebears, certificates which proved that they themselves did not suffer inherited madness, allowing them to marry into polite society with the mad money they had inherited.)

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Brahms’s attentions to Clara had grown as Robert’s had withdrawn. Brahms no doubt needed an unreachable love, having grown up playing background music in bordellos, where the residents regarded him as a mascot. Love was platonic and reserved for pure affections; lust was for brothels. Brahms was awkward with women; he possibly would act as guilty as he felt of impure thoughts. But with a maternal musician (Clara had seven surviving children and was 14 years older than Brahms), he could speak of music alone, and allow passion to bloom outside the pressures of sensuality.

Johannes and Clara agreed that after Robert died, they would marry. But after Schumann died in 1856, Brahms left town. He knew he was married to music. Clara had young children at home.

It was too much for Brahms. And so Clara realized she was truly alone.

It took Brahms 23 years to begin to apologize. When he did, it was through music, with his first four intermezzi: short, matter of fact, with slight but as yet hidden deviations into Robert Schumann’s Clara motif. In these early efforts, the great Brahms is muted.

Brahms lived to be 64. It wasn’t until 1892, when he was almost 60, that he was somehow freed to incorporate into his music the Clara theme, in ways even more gorgeous than Schumann’s.

Schumann had woven the Clara theme into his piano concertos, into the Carnaval, even into his F-sharp Romanze in 1839, written when he was only 29. Never was the Clara theme more obvious, more integrated, more heartbreaking. The entire piece is only 34 measures long. (It is the first piece I play here.) It is the piece around which the intermezzi whirl.

Fifty-three years later, Brahms figured out how to do the same thing Robert had done at 29.

By that time, Brahms had already composed his folk songs, his love songs, his gypsy songs, his waltzes, his Hungarian dances, his chamber works, his two great concertos, even his symphonies.

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In his four last collections (Opp. 116, 117, 118, and 119), written at the end of his life, he wrote the 14 great intermezzi, filled simple technique, and yet modulations that are still heartbreaking 150 years later.

In these pieces he no longer hid the Clara theme: he celebrated it, with as much invention as his Handel Variations or his German Requiem. Each version of the theme used exactly the same four notes, and yet each version was entirely new, wrenching.

He and Clara would play them together in their last years, reminiscing. Only Clara knew how clever they were, and the meaning they bore. Her children would have paid no attention. But a great history, both in music, in affection, and in a strange kind of loyalty, was unfolding. This was a marriage, borne aloft after the fact by notes alone, but creating all the passion, warmth, nostalgia of any intense, lifelong love.

They had three years of this Wagnerian idyll, brewed over a lifetime of tragedy and betrayal, steeped in Schumann’s near-suicide, incubated over the length of the greatest epoch in creative history: Liszt, Chopin, Brahms, Schumann, Wagner, Schubert, Mendelssohn, Berlioz, Goethe, Byron, Coleridge, Keats, Schiller, Hugo, de Musset, Lamartine, Gautier, Stendhal, Turner, Friedrich, Constable, Lorrain, Blake, Church, Bierstadt, the Brontës, Jane Austen. Never had so many young prodigies been so in love with love, believing in art for art’s sake.

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The World Wars, disease, disillusionment, anomie, noise, atonality, irony led to a very different world soon after Brahms and Clara died. It was childhood’s end.

Brahms died in 1897, Clara in 1896.

On her deathbed, she asked her grandson Ferdinand to play her husband’s F-sharp major Romanze for her. This is the piece with which I begin the concert.

In it is a muted waltz, such as would be played by musicians outdoors under the trees of the Prater gardens in Vienna, as small children ran around the bandstand and midges danced in the long twilight. The midsection is the Clara theme; this time only three notes descend.

Brahms died 11 months later. It was almost the fin de siècle, the end of a century, and of an era.

Oscar Wilde died of meningitis in 1900 at a cheap hotel in Paris. The world would never be as carefree, as indolent. Lazy afternoons on the river, in the park, music played in the drawing room, the drawing room itself, all would be gone in a few decades of disease and death: World War I, brought to an end by the Spanish Flu, so called because only Spain reported its existence.

But the paradise lives on, in these intermezzi, in the afternoons they bring back, the insouciance, the clean air, carriages on cobblestones, lace fringes and leather gloves, in Johannes’s and Clara’s freedom to love from afar, faithfully, without any thought of jealousy, without sensuality. The last minutes of sheer Romantic love. Proust would catalogue it in the Faubourg Saint-Germain, Robert Musil in Vienna.

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And here, for an hour, you can hear its heartbeat. You can be alone with Johannes and Clara, in their household, still one of the few people in the world to share their secret. Their ruined, wrong, tragic love. And to be able, with them, to marvel at how it all transmigrated into music.

Russian pianists like Volodos try to find the orchestral timbres smelting among the ashes of Brahms’s passion, of his attempt to write his way out of his immortal humiliation for having left Clara at the altar. Volodos drives the notes before him like sheep, intent on the horizontal rush to glory.

Seong-Jin Cho’s approach is wiser, free of performance nerves and posturing, calm and infused with the lassitude of Viennese summers in the park.

Glenn Gould focuses on the vertical, the interlacing of notes in each chord, voicings from forgotten cultures. He is intent on singing Clara’s lament by stressing the pain of the melody, of the inner voices, as if the split personalities of Schumann howl through the trees of the Prater.

Each note is about life, or death.

I am of that calling. I think it depends on which version captures your heart at an early age, and I was born into the era of Gould, from which there is no return. I have tried to add my own sense of how the conflicting melodies, les paroles confuses, swirl around the constant anchor of Clara’s theme. But in most ways the great challenge is to do nothing at all, to leave them alone and let them sing.

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My teacher, Russell Sherman, studied with Eduard Steuermann, who in turn studied with Busoni and Schoenberg, whose many piano works he debuted. Steuermann taught Alfred Brendel, Theodor Adorno, Gunther Schuller, and Menahem Pressler. So I am in a direct line with the Marxist and Hegelian dialectics of those stern practitioners.

The German School believed in analyzing the vertical, to the point of coming to a complete halt. So many things were happening up and down the apartment block of the chord that you lost the momentum of the street.

My first piano was a 1928 Steinway, which refused to play fast. It brought out all the voices, the trios and quartets in the chords. It didn’t play single notes.

It played 1928. I regret that we ever let it go. The resonance of this instrument led Cathy and me on a quest to find instruments which could reproduce the twilight of those golden years, the piano sounds I remembered coming from Victrolas in Victorian houses in my childhood.

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And while I feign wariness today, I have been from my youth as deeply mired in Viennese values as Gould or Gropius, as anyone in the Weimar Republic, the center of the last gasp of Romanticism before the wars brought in atonality, entropy, and atrophy.

Rather than reading about Brahms, and seeing Brahms looking in a mirror, it is possibly more enlightening to put yourself in Brahms’s place: Brahms looking out of a window. What did he see? What influenced him? What went into his immense longing, his Sehnsucht? It wasn’t just nostalgia for the life that late he led, for the great works he wrote; it was mourning for the entire pageantry of it, for the meaning behind the notes, for the indolence of a world without consequences, where “illusion and reality embraced elegantly, seamlessly,” as Frederic Morton put it in Thunder at Twilight.

Books that capture the Viennese zeitgeist are Eric Kandel’s The Age of Insight: The Quest to Understand the Unconscious in Art, Mind, and Brain; Morton’s Thunder at Twilight: Vienna 1913–1914; Morton’s A Nervous Splendor: Vienna 1888–1889; and Carl Schorske’s Fin-de-Siècle Vienna: Politics and Culture.

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Clara’s Andantino Clara’s initial theme, Op. 3, the Lento of the Romance variée in C Major, was written in 1833,

when she was 14. The piece was to resound between her, her husband, Robert, and their young boarder, Johannes Brahms, for the rest of their lives. Robert wrote variations on it, then Clara wrote variations on those variations, then Brahms wrote variations on those variations, until finally Brahms embodied the five descending notes of the theme into almost every composition he wrote in the last few years of his life, as an apology to Clara. Despite leaving her at the altar (although he did provide financial help for her family), he loved her more than anyone in his life, and always had. It was that love which created many of Brahms’s best pieces—as Schumann’s love for Clara had created many of his own major works.

Clara’s Lento theme was in C major, an easy key for a young virtuoso. By the time it was later morphed by Robert into the Andantino, it was in F minor.

The lento theme was used by Robert in his Impromptus, Op.5 (specifically in No. 11), of 1833;

by Clara herself in her set of Variationen über ein Thema von Robert Schumann, Op. 20 (the last variation); and in Brahms’s 1854 Variations on a Theme by Robert Schumann, Op. 9 (Variation 15).

Schumann’s Grand Sonata No. 3, Opus 14 in F, the immensely complicated “Concerto without Orchestra” of 1836, has for its third movement Quasi variazione, “sort of” variations on Clara’s Andantino theme, which is turned by Robert from C Major into F Minor. Here the early Romance theme has become minor and grown enormously in dignity from Clara’s Czernyesque Op. 3 Lento. I suspect that Schumann rewrote it.

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The key of C is very plain vanilla, easy for children, as it has no sharps or flats. C is, however, brittle, and lacks ambiance. The key of F is the next-easiest key. But it is warmer. When it becomes minor it ends up with four flats, which adds an enormous aura to it. It becomes twinned with D-flat, the ultimate key of repose and meditation.

Schumann’s second Romanze of his Drei Romanzen, Op. 28, of 1839, when he was 29 and Clara was 20, is in F-sharp minor. This is the piece Clara asked to hear on her deathbed. It is the ultimate incarnation of their tennis game of bandying the Lento theme back and forth. Here Robert has brought their more juvenile imitations to the point of genius. Surprisingly, this Romanze is one of the least known of Robert’s pieces, possibly because it is so short (only 34 measures).

F minor has become F-sharp minor, an immensely more complicated (six sharps) and intellectual key. As well, there are now three staffs, which provides a middle staff for the melody, shared between the two thumbs. This is a notation which stresses the singing quality of the thumbs.

This was the epitome of the Lento exchanges.

But Clara didn’t give up. When she was 34, she wrote variations on Robert’s version of her Andantino, which survives as her Op. 20 of 1853, Variationen über ein Thema von Robert Schumann.

By now Clara’s variations, like Robert’s Romanze, are in F-sharp minor, which lends gravitas to the more juvenile Lento theme. These new variations were in the minor key, darkening them further.

This provides a clue as to how entwined they were, as lovers and as composers.

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A year later, in 1854, Robert was in the asylum, and Clara had given birth to their eighth and last child. Clara wasn’t allowed to see her husband, but Brahms went back and forth between the Schumanns.

Brahms at that stage had been composing variations on Robert’s Bunte Blätter (Colored Leaves), Op. 99, which he brought one by one to Clara as he wrote them. They were eventually titled Variations on a Theme by Robert Schumann, Op. 9, based primarily on the fourth variation of Bunte Blätter, which was also the variation on which Clara based her Op. 20 variations of the previous year.

Now three composers are using one another for inspiration, a seesaw with Clara’s theme as the fulcrum. Brahms’s first eight Op. 9 variations are in the F minor key of the Andantino. The final phrase of Variation 10 quotes the “Theme by Clara Wieck” on which Schumann based his Op. 5 Impromptus.

I play here the greatest survivors of this epic exchange, Schumann’s second Romanze and my favorites of Brahms’s last intermezzi.

A world of notes, of fantasies and concertos, of symphonies and chamber works by the greatest musicians of the age had been inspired by five notes from a 14-year-old.

And arguably the greatest works of the greatest composer, the intermezzi of Brahms, had evolved from those five notes.

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Silence in Brahms’s E-Flat Intermezzo Beethoven gets credit for being the lead advocate of writing silence. Everything Beethoven

did, he did with such energy and delirium that it seemed bigger and more emphatic than the genteel pauses in Haydn, or the witty full stops of C.P.E. Bach, where a scale will rush frantically to the cliff’s edge, and then stop dead right before the plunge, that is, before the resolution of the scale. Defying expectations was what C.P.E. Bach, Haydn, and Beethoven did.

But Beethoven added an element of pure silence. A fundamental, primordial soup, a chasm out of which the music rose. My teacher, Russell Sherman, used to say that you had to play silences.

Energy builds in the deafening pauses in a concert hall, coupled with fear from the audience that you’ve forgotten the music, which adds to the urgency of getting back to it, so it’s very hard to pause for as long as Beethoven wants you to.

Silences are part of sound (Paul Simon’s sounds of silence). This is true because sound is a frequency, a part of an energy grid which extends throughout everything in the multiverse.

Sound is both a wave and a particle, a force and a stasis. Silence is part of that grid as well. We can’t see the grid, nor can we hear most of the frequencies, which lie both above and below our limited ability to hear. But together, the frequencies and the energy glue the multiverse together.

This is why music, which is expressed to our hearing as a range of frequencies, is in fact a much more primordial, integral component of the world we think we understand, of what we think we hear and see.

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The skein, or cat’s cradle of energy, which we call electricity (to make its identity somewhat familiar), is in fact a much more raw complicity of matter, related possibly to the negative matter of a black hole, which was present before the Big Bang and which allowed the Singularity, the expansion of matter into all of space in less than a second. But in order to make it at least linguistically visible, I’ll call it the energy trellis.

In quantum physics it is now understood that energy exchanges can happen between the far reaches of the universe in an instant, millions of times faster than the fastest speed Einstein knew: the speed of light, which is 186,282 miles per second, enough to go around the circumference of the earth (25,000 miles) seven and a half times in one second. That is, if a change happens to one particle here, its twin particle reacts instantly there, no matter where it is. This reaction isn’t dependent on physical distance, what we would call “reality.” There is a deeper underlying reality.

So a particle which is acted on will immediately influence its twin particle, no matter where that twin is located. As Einstein predicated, particles come in pairs. Their bond defies time and space. When twin particles react together, it isn’t an event which has a speed. It’s an event which celebrates the fact that all locations are infinitely close, and thus can be instantly connected.

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I have a friend who sat up in bed one night, gasping. She knew her sister was in trouble.

Her sister was being chased down a beach in the Caribbean, a thousand miles away, and my friend knew it, instantly. It didn’t need a phone call. It was an instant connection. If this hasn’t happened to you, it’s impossible to believe. And yet it happens to people all the time. Twins are connected in ways that defy time and space. As are sisters.

Pythagoras called this underlying complicity “the music of the spheres,” constant tones or “fundaments,” like low single notes played by the deep bourdon pipe on an organ, which hold the planets in their orbits and even string the stars together.

We know from recordings made by NASA that black holes vibrate in low B-flat. We also know that the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter hums. Asteroids spin like tops, and hum the way tops hum. When an asteroid loses its spin, its humming also loses its pitch. Now, unaligned with the belt, the asteroid falls to earth, or to Mars or Jupiter, flaming out as a meteor. When it lands on earth it is called a meteorite, a rock and metal artifact of the cosmic tops which are only the most obvious indicators of the forces which shape our lives.

As Tom Stoppard said, things we know about are influenced by things we only know a little about, which in turn are influenced by things we know nothing at all about. Or, to quote Hamlet, “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”

And so when you play a silence you’re only continuing with music by other means.

I’m convinced that music sounds better when it is surrounded by silence. At Tippet Rise, there are no airline flight patterns nearby, no towns or highways. Just sheep and cows. Even the phone Brahms in the Mountains 45

and power lines are buried. So music played outside in the summer comes out of the hum of the insects, out of the haze of the early morning heat, out of color of the endless sky. The curve of the earth seems almost visible under the big sky. You feel closer to the constellations at night, and to the clouds at day. It may seem psychosomatic, but all the phenomena I’ve been talking about are scientific facts, rather than whimsical fancies.

We are star creatures, made up of not only ingredients found on planets but also elements found only in stars. So we resonate with the motion, with the orbits, with the dance of those planets and stars. The Norse believed that the stars were held up on the branches of an enormous tree, Igdrasil. The universe’s electric trellis is that tree. We all sway together in the solar wind, bound up in the same drama.

When I was young, I thought it was smart to deny anything which I hadn’t encountered physically in my short lifetime. Now I realize how wise it is to be open to the invisible aspects of existence. As John Donne wrote, “If thou be’st born to strange sights, Things invisible to see....”

All of this is a long way of saying that, when Brahms integrates silences into his music, it isn’t to ignore the sounds, to rest his fingers, or because he suddenly doesn’t know what to say. The silences are notes, in which overtones and undertones, gamma rays and solar storms, fragments of the northern lights, prominences on the sun’s surface, the buzzing of the spotlights on the stage, the fizzling of high-tension wires, all combine to create a cosmic dance which grows louder the longer the music pauses. We have time to reconsider the tapering off of the notes we just heard, to anticipate how the new notes will rise from the ashes of the old notes, to experience the shock of a world momentarily without a human presence, a landscape suddenly bleached of cities and roads. The primitive hackles start to rise on the backs of our necks. Something is up.

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The challenge for composers is to rise to the occasion of their self-imposed split-second sabbatical, to shock the senses, or, as Hamlet says, make mad the guilty and appall the free, confound the ignorant, and amaze indeed the very faculties of eyes and ears.

One place where this tirade of silence occurs is in the Intermezzo in E-flat Major, Op. 117, No. 1. The lyrical Scottish folk tune fades away into a full fermata, a “hold” symbol, as if Brahms wants to give the pianist time to think, to adjust to the intimidating new world of six flats which appears over the horizon right after the fermata. As my wife, Cathy, points out, a fermata in fact looks like a setting sun, sitting on the horizon. In Spanish, it is a corona, or crown. In fact, just before this fermata, the simple E-flat Clara theme has darkened as it descends four times into chaos. The childlike sky of the song which Brahms quotes in a text above the music, Lady Anne Bothwell’s Lament (Schlaf sanft mein Kind, “sleep gently my child”), has developed clouds.

Suddenly every note is flatted, as if the wind has risen and a storm is coming. The melody slows down a lot—ritardando molto—and for 17 measures the Più adagio takes over. Not quite Beethoven’s storm in the Pastoral Symphony, this starkly altered landscape is however equally frightening, if on a smaller scale.

The chords cannot be explained. Can they be derived from the sunny first theme? They are in the same key, but everything is minor. The descending Clara theme has disappeared, and what Brahms in the Mountains 47

48 Brahms in the Mountains

appears are only chords that might accompany it in a nightmare. They undulate, oscillate in a demonic lilt. The bass continues to provide the appearance of normalcy by accompanying these chords with arpeggios. But the arpeggios take breaks, they are intermittent, like lightning. The chords bear no hearable relation to the folk song. What is going on?

Although the slowly running arpeggios make sure there is a continuity between notes, the silence is apparent in the treble, almost invisibly mandated by the dislocations between chords.

And the silence lies as well in the breaks of the arpeggios below. There is no modulation, no logical reason for the sudden harmonic changes. The comforting harmony of the folk song has been run through a fun house, its traditional chords torn apart.

After five measures of this, the Clara theme appears, disfigured, like one of Berlioz’s demonic references to his obsession with Harriet Smithson in the Symphonie fantastique. Clara has come a bête noire, a monster. Infatuation turns into hideous doubt, and Brahms’s sense of identity is lost. He was never very good with the concept of married love. He has lost his bearings, his harmony. He is an asteroid losing his spin, in danger of falling out of the sky.

Atonal discordances mangle the chords, which themselves are inexplicable. It is as if Brahms has become Schoenberg. This is Liszt’s music of the future.

Ten years before, Liszt had written the czardas, which he titled both macabre and obstinate, distended Hungarian folk songs where he removed any reassuring harmonies and let the sheer atonal devil dance.

Goethe had started it with his novel Elective Affinities, where he removed all the adjectives, leaving the nouns to fend for themselves. This new novel led ultimately to the nouveau roman Brahms in the Mountains 49

experiments of Marguerite Duras in Paris. As Walter Benjamin said in his celebrated essay on Goethe’s novel, the technique spoke for unimaginable freedom, and was the only way to transcend myth. The myth which had to be transcended was the dangerous nationalism which was to end Benjamin’s life. He tried to escape fascist Germany by traveling from France to Spain, from which he would ship out to America, but Franco had canceled all transit visas, and that night in his hotel Benjamin took an overdose of morphine. Ironically, the day before his visa would have worked, and the day after his party was allowed passage, possibly because Spanish officials were shocked by Benjamin’s suicide. So he was trapped by the myths he had written for himself, which he had understandably extrapolated from the disintegration of society around him. But that was many years later, in 1940.

Still, the seeds of discord and anarchy had been sowed, and they are here in the most idyllic of intermezzi.

Brahms was on the opposite side of this trend to atonality, ironically, which led from Liszt and Wagner to Schoenberg, Varèse, Berg, and others, predicting the chaos which the composers saw all too clearly in the breakdown of the Habsburg empire, the loss of social order which led to World War I and the demons of anarchy.

Brahms was determined to be the voice of reason, of nostalgia for the past, in the midst of the despair around him, as was Rachmaninoff only a decade later. Brahms’s intermezzi, the last gasp of civility before Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring in 1913 put into sound what everyone already knew in their hearts, were an attempt to compose modern discontent away, to outwrite the noise and anguish of the increasingly virulent mobs, to hold back the night.

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Brahms had already put more emphatic pauses into his first Piano Concerto back in 1858. But in this innocent intermezzo, the pauses seem uncalled-for, brazen, Satanic. He is negotiating against himself, playing the devil’s advocate with Clara’s theme. That is the dark side of silence: it is the sleep of reason.

Then the midsection, descending towards darkness, abruptly shifts into the light with the return of the initial theme.

Such schoolteacher talk obscures the extraordinary revelation of this transfiguration. Out of madness and that fermata, the setting sun has risen again. As Othello says of Desdemona, “And when I love thee not, chaos is come again.”

There is another way in which silence creates a negative space which ultimately allows positive space to surge through it.

Brahms saw that so many traditional Irish and Scottish folk songs are made up of those downward notes which were Robert Schumann’s Clara theme.

This especially lovely version starts out with the folk song itself, creating a mathematical set of expectations for a comforting life, even if it is composed of another nation’s harmonies, values from an ancient Celtic tribe.

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But then Brahms brings in the silence, the music of the future, the black hole.

When the original theme returns, it is a full religious resurrection, not only of the theme and its Celtic values, but of Viennese sensibility. Brahms has attached his, and our own, expectations to this lyric Scottish template, and merged our lives with the age-old rituals of the past. He has created a new culture out of the cloth of another century. We rise with Brahms, Robert, and Clara from the ashes of a child’s tune into a reality where that tune has become our own hopes and loves, a reality which couldn’t exist if it hadn’t gone through the darkness of those disconnected silences.

It is like Pamina and Tamino, the princess and prince of Mozart’s The Magic Flute, who must go through the Masonic ritual of enforced silence, which is usually dramatized as a linear tunnel or a prison of different harmonies and arias, before they can emerge into the light of love and trust. And so in this most iconic of all the intermezzi Brahms disorients us in order to recreate a new, shared world out of an old, discarded harmony. A zeitgeist out of four notes.

Which world the intermezzi to follow will continue to enlarge.

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Playing the Notes I was influenced in my youth by Gould’s transcendent 1960 album of Brahms pieces. His

tempo was slow and meditative, similar to that of his 1981 Goldberg Variations. You can’t play fast when you have a lot to say about every chord. Henry VIII’s barge processing grandly up the Thames would have looked trivial with an outboard motor on the back. August harbor yachts are not vinyl-lacquered Chris-Crafts.

As Gould said of the recording: I have captured, I think, an atmosphere of improvisation which I don’t believe has ever been represented in Brahms recordings before…total introversion, with brief outbursts of searing pain culminating in long stretches of muted grief….

Harold Schonberg, in his The Lives of the Great Composers (1970) wrote:

It is the twilight of Romanticism, and the peculiar glow of this setting sun is hard to describe. It beams a steady, warm light, not flaring up as it does in the music of Mahler, not looming big halfway over the horizon as in the symphonies of Bruckner, not erupting with solar explosions as in the music of Richard Strauss. It is the music of a creative mind completely sure of its materials, and it combines technique with a mellow, golden glow. In a day when the gigantic operas of Wagner dominated the opera house, when the shocking symphonic poems of Richard Strauss were the talk of Europe, the music of Brahms continued to represent in an intensified way what it had always represented—integrity, the spirit of Beethoven and Schumann, the attitude of the pure and serious musician interested only in creating a series of abstract sounds in forms best realized to enhance those sounds.

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Radu Lupu’s 1982 Decca recording (some of it available on YouTube: https://www.youtube. com/watch?v=m6Fq5GhUwgA) is very similar to Gould’s in its finding in the architecture and in the pauses of the structure the motivation for the notes. Beauty lies in the voicings, the still center of the modulations, rather than in the rhythmic drive which a concert audience requires for its sense of blood drawn, dragons slain.

This temptation towards what Harold Schonberg calls the “solar explosions” is what led Gould to reject the concert hall in favor of the truths that we tell only to ourselves in the quiet of the night, privately at the piano. Gould took over the details of recording himself, and sent Columbia the results, to keep the concept of “performing,” of pleasing “the other,” even the recording engineer, out of his introspection. When you feel you are being watched, or predicted, you act differently. As with fame, you play your fame, you give the public what you think it expects, what it thinks it expects—you imitate yourself, and evening dies under the glare of the stage lights.

Not that there’s only one way to play the intermezzi: faster tempos allow the music to ripple, to flow. But to me there is a stateliness and an intimacy to the pieces which dictates a tempo closer to the human heartbeat.

My own heart beats quite slowly. I am reminded of Victor Borge falling asleep while playing the first movement of the “Moonlight” sonata. So the Brahms intermezzi are for me similar to Proust’s metaphor of falling asleep at the beginning of Swann’s Way. As Dylan Thomas put it, “out of all sound except the distant speaking of the voices I sometimes hear a moment before sleep....” This is also the way many people write poetry: in a trance, the last moment before falling asleep, when the ego is removed from the light, and ideas appear without words or shape, as close to the essence of existence as possible.

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Grigory Sokolov has the stillness and the majesty which suit the intermezzi, riven with intermittent eccentricities. Maria João Pires is, as always, as perfect as Dinu Lipatti should be, every note where it should be, maybe the crescendos a bit bland. But no false orchestral swells.

Self-effacingly quiet.

Lipatti himself plays too fast, as does Jorge Bolet, as does Artur Schnabel, as does Sokolov in Op. 117, No. 3. Restraint only works so long, and before long virtuosos like Sokolov or Volodos are compelled to abandon the pose and go for gold, as if the cheap thrills of playing an easy piece fast is what will convince people that somehow the slick version is better. They have in fact undermined the summer, and introduced modernity, steam engines, airplanes, into the rhythms of a carriage ride.

Gould, the most eccentric pianist on record, has the most perfect, unyielding atomic clock of them all, subject only to ritards, not to sudden sforzandi or disruptions in the snowfall, the sudden accelerandi, stops, or orphaned notes of Sokolov. Gould’s tone is not only part of the piece, filling the entire horizon of the microphone, but his moments of revelation are psychologically deep: not effects, or tricks, but real. To be a Brahms pianist, more than fingers, you need a heart.

Not schmaltz or sentimentality, but respect for the beat of the blood. His slow moments are out of Debussy or Stockhausen, the voicings are oboes, and above it all is the lowering sky of Mussorgsky or Böcklin’s Isle of the Dead.

The most virtuosic of all, Valentina Lisitsa, has in fact the greatest empathy with Brahms, his dreamy Prater rainfalls and long mountain walks, without ever being mawkish. She draws the perfect balance between nostalgia and genuine longing, never losing the sadness or the slowness, never lapsing into sudden insecure speed. She, Hélène Grimaud, Pires, and Gould are the great Brahms pianists of our age. Without the adrenalin of tourist buses, their sounds echo the bells of Austrian clocktowers. Grimaud is the most pianistic, building to gorgeous Brahms in the Mountains 57

climaxes without disrupting the curve of the hills, bringing in sudden quiet to her storms.

Mikhail Rudy, the least-known pianist here, a brilliantly accomplished polymath, plays the intermezzi beautifully.

It is reassuring that the people who most respect the stillness of the 1890s are women like Pires, who understands the countryside, and contemporary women like Grimaud and Lisitsa, who have the passion and a kind of hidden anger which ironically restrains them.

My first piano was a seven-foot 1928 Steinway. Its action was very tough, and I was convinced that it made my playing vertical, where I focused on voicing each chord, rather than horizontal, where the music pushed past the goalposts of the measure bars without a second thought.

I finally sold the piano because I thought it was interfering with my ability to play in a linear fashion. (I later learned that the action could have been “eased,” or made faster, very easily.)

And I am still a vertical introvert.

In some ways the sound of the 1928 Steinway made me want to play it slowly, to savor it. I’ve never encountered that specific timbre again, and I regret selling it. The two 1897 Steinways which Tali Mahanor found and restored for us brought back a lot of the sound of that era, and I’ve used one of them, the nine-foot concert grand which Tali has named Seraphina, for this album.

Although every note has three strings which produce its tone, in an older Steinway like Seraphina those strings are of different lengths and produce an average frequency, rather than being completely in unison, allowing for a shimmer to the notes, a broader definition of what we ask of tuning. This produces the flickering harmonies of an old Beaux Arts Trio recording from the early ‘60s, and is closer to what Brahms himself would have expected from a piano in 1892, when he began to write the intermezzi.

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My teacher in Boston, Russell Sherman, always said that every note must be played like it’s life or death. I’m reminded of the Polanski film The Pianist, where the pianist Szpilman plays for his life in front of a Nazi captain. Later, when he is free to play the Grande polonaise brillante in public, it becomes a visceral representation of the freedom that music celebrates, and what we play for.

At a time when performance is in quarantine against the dangers of the 2020 coronavirus, it is more evident than ever that music is life in the face of death, that the profound grief of Brahms’s last pieces for piano is a requiem for everything that we lose when music in real time is paused.

A few months seems like years, and a year will seem like a lifetime.

I hope the privacy of the recording process at Tippet Rise produces, especially when heard in more detailed resolution, some of the virtual presence which Gould sought in the middle of the night. We summon up cultures long past when we exhume their mists and their losses, and so even a live performance is necromancy: raising the dead. The idea is to eliminate the middleman, to forget the hall, the pianist, the hovering microphones, and to pass directly into the heart of what Brahms was trying to say.

Music is only a translation of the life behind it. I have to hope that a virtual concert might in a way bypass the doors and chairs and hammers which normally distract us from these ancient, resurrected spirits.

If Brahms’s Four Serious Songs of 1896 are spiritually transcendent, the intermezzi of 1892–93, his last pieces for piano, provide the inner sanctuaries where Brahms hides his deepest human emotions, as Walter Benjamin suggested that Chopin hid his soul in the inner sections of his preludes.

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Intermezzo, Op. 117, No. 2 Brahms shifts his allegiances every second, as downward ripples in the clouds are answered

with upward ripples from below, their reflections in water, often in a related but different key.

What is a relative minor, other than Clara Schumann? If you take the same number of flats as the bucolic key of D-flat major but think of how to make everything heartbreaking and unstable, instead of serene and grounded, you notice that the note you always arrive at is B-flat.

It is the evil twin, the mirror opposite of the benign D-flat. But note how B-flat retains the softness and charm of D-flat. Although there is rain, the sun sits happily in the corner, as light and shade flirt with clouds. The splendor of the major is never too far away.

But Brahms never gets his hands on that resplendent major—resolution, happiness, fulfillment always being just out of reach as it was in his life, as logarithmic harmony imitates biological emotions. Brahms is using his sad, slightly-too-high, melody-missing cries to explain his sorrow as clearly as a bell. But note that he always aims too high, not too low: Brahms is clearly aware that aiming high is a preferable error. Sopranos and tenors always think of a point just above a note in order to convince their voices to err on the side of angels. Brahms is aware of the redeeming aspect music lends to his less attractive persona: too much time playing background music in bordellos as a child.

Brahms slips around the sky of the keyboard without committing himself to where he wants to rest for the first minute or so, until he comes to the midsection, which you can recognize by its sudden melody, when the ripples stop and a quiet midsummer stillness takes over. There is a pause, a small cadenza, where the pianist becomes somewhat overexcited. But this is like a 62 Brahms in the Mountains

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hothouse where themes mature like vines, and what comes out of the loud chords and then the small Lisztian descent from the heavens is the idea that the entire piece perhaps does have a theme, an underpinning, and that perhaps it is a note, and then the note half a note below it.

Just these two notes, so when the ripples begin again, you can suddenly grow with the music and realize the sadness that is being celebrated.

Schumann had a descending theme which for him meant Clara, whom he eloped with when she was a child. Clara became Germany’s greatest pianist and Schumann lapsed into madness.

In the middle of this transition Brahms and Clara fell in love.

The two-note theme of descent in this Intermezzo is perhaps a nostalgic echo of Schumann’s more robust four-note Clara theme. In fact, Brahms links his two-note descent with a second two-note descent to form the entire Clara theme, but in a minor key. The effect is ineffably, indescribably sad. It mixes love with loss, and at the very end Schumann’s four-note theme of love for Clara is finally, shamelessly reached by his replacement, Brahms.

Why the minor mode? Much blood had passed under the bridge since Clara’s youth, and Brahms’s involvement had become less naive, enervated with Schumann’s death, his betrayal of Clara, his ascension.

Musicians think in keys, which are like colors that shape their contents. Notes are not tones (although tone is an anagram of note), but like chess moves, moves of a body, an arm stretching, a hand held out. A game of Twister. Notes come in phrases, in bundles, and they clash and agree, like a sword fight. Let me try to illustrate how these phrases take on lives of their own.

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D-flat major, blasÊ but happy, mingles with its darker mirror image (that is, B-flat minor) two notes down the keyboard: its relative minor. So D-flat’s darker underbelly (B-flat minor) is exposed. There are only two notes, D-flat and B-flat, but who are they? Johannes and Clara, Robert and Johannes, Robert and Clara? A three-way love triangle is being fought out by two of the players, possibly by all three of them, with their emotions swapping notes, flowing and fluctuating like a note in a bottle across history to our Instagram ears.

The four-note descent of the Clara theme has many manifestations, growing in power. The tranquil major-key D-flat midsection starts soothingly with the Clara theme. Then it is turned upside down, and then the inversion is inverted, until it progresses upwards, joyously. In a diminished mode it marches threateningly around in a dark pinwheel of apprehension.

This entire saga then repeats. Silences appear between the first two and the last two notes. The right hand angrily descends, but a split second later, a little late, the left hand ascends. This is some kind of war. Is it between Brahms and Schumann, Clara and Robert, or Brahms and his own guilt? It is certainly between the positive and the negative versions of the Clara theme. The battle lasts only about 10 seconds.

Then each side gets its say. First, the upwards theme, then the downwards, then the upwards.

These arpeggios, or broken chords played note by note, then turn into an angry chord where the top notes ring out the two-note descent. Then a second chord intrudes, where the bottom notes respond with a two-note ascent.

This repeats lower down on the piano, and then a final quiet poignant chord almost wins the day with the descent theme, until the deep bass responds with two growling, quiet ascent notes, modulating into an ascending arpeggio which is rapidly contradicted by a small descending Lisztian cadenza.

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A few silences, and the first theme reappears, only this time more insistent, more sure of itself. Now you can hear easily the four Clara notes descending. Instead of small half-tone intervals, the melody breaks out into tones farther apart, which fly higher upwards and deeper downwards. The stakes have gotten higher, more insistent. The original personalities which caused the inner, philosophic theme have been lost, subsumed into the glory of the idea itself, as the music takes over, genius replacing rote, collaboration replacing jealousy, joy leaping beyond mere structure.

Instead of single notes descending, now the descents are five notes apart. This is where the piece modulates into eternity, but it may initially sound like it has overstepped the narrow confines of its theme and become obscurantist. How did a walk turn into a jog? Where was the transition? Even though the plan is gradual and well thought out, suddenly you are running, trying to remember when the trot turned into a race.

Now the episode peters out, winding down to four last chords which are the final conclusion of this Clara debate, depressing and minor. But at the last second the final note produces a flight up to heaven, world-weary and heavy with experience, but sublime.

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This is the kind of storytelling we find in Mahler and Richard Strauss—debates over the fate of the universe, laden with casualties of war, transfixed by music, shot through with pollen in the Viennese twilight. The generation that was to follow (Berg, Webern, Schoenberg) would dispense with such genius and such impure mixtures of thought and music, depleting structure of its emotional baggage, risking tone for its own sake. Removing the adjectives, like Goethe’s Elective Affinities. Eliminating the sentimentality of description for the sheer action of verbs, for the heroes of nouns.

But it little profits a man to gain the whole world and lose his immortal soul. The Germans had gained music at the expense of the self. They had won the admiration of their own backyard, but lost the world. They kept the nouns, but lost the soul of the adjectives.

But in the round world of the outmoded long-playing disc, old carriage wheels still clack noisily and painfully over uneven ground, the thump of the vinyl, bringing back the ambiance of imperfection. Brahms is not a composer for perfection, like the scintillations of Liszt or Ligeti.

He is a compiler of flaws, of the hiss of the steam heat, the slip of the finger, the pause of the little finger a little too long before it merges with the note it intended, just below it. The pain of love lost, thrown away, demeaned.

In the clarity of DXD, we can hear the imperfections of the piano, the conflicting tunings of the strings, the world of Brahms’s time, with its stenches and flowers, and the weakest link of all, the pianist, torn between notes, like a diplomat trying to serve three countries at once, and pleasing no one.

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The Brahms Piano The piano I’m playing on these downloads is at Tippet Rise, in its all-larch Olivier Music Barn.

Let me talk about the Barn for a second. Every right angle is turned into a much wider angle by putting boards across it, so there are none of the harsh bounces which arise from notes bouncing back and forth and canceling one another out, creating half-tones and broken fragments of sound, when you have “right” angles. There’s nothing right about them....

Larch is a beautiful, light-colored wood, not too soft and not too hard, which gives a beautiful sonic coloration to notes.

Behind the larch is “cement board,” a high-strength sheetrock which is mold-, moisture-, and fire-resistant, made by the Hatschek process, during which unbleached cellulose fibers are repulped in water and then refined before being mixed with cement, water, silica, and limestone flour. The mixture is then deposited onto a wire substrate, vacuum dewatered, and cured to form a cement sheet. This creates a hard, concrete-like bounce, which helps the notes keep their integrity and their power. Since the sounds aren’t absorbed, they retain more of their shape and their information.

The ceiling is a smaller version of the ceiling at Snape Maltings, designed by Arup, the great architectural and acoustical firm.

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Snape Maltings was a huge old barn in Aldeburgh, Suffolk, used for storing malt for the production of beer. Benjamin Britten, who was born nearby, bought the barn and repurposed it for his operas. The property has lawns rolling down to the North Sea coast, the ideal setting for outdoor (and indoor) productions of his nautical operas, such as Billy Budd and Peter Grimes. The acoustic design of the original barn was carried out in the 1960s by Derek Sugden of Arup, the company we hired to design our barn at Tippet Rise. Our team was led by Raj Patel, and our head acoustician was Alban Bassuet, who later became the first director of Tippet Rise. Arup continues to consult for Tippet Rise.

Sugden found that roof design was key to the long reverberation time requested by Britten.

A slope of 45 degrees was considered the best option and resulted in what is known in design circles as the “Snape Roof.” It’s like putting a small barn as a cupola on top of a normal barn.

The sound initially rises, bounces around in this extra space, and falls like sonic rain on the audience, softened, but with the same volume it started with.

Another Arup innovation is the “halo,” an extended ledge running around the room where the wall first meets the curve of the ceiling. This ledge, which in our case is a foot wide, catches the “first bounce.” This is where the sound first hits, and it returns a part of it instantly to the audience, giving the notes both accuracy and power.

What the Esterházys did when they built a room for Haydn, their court composer, in their Hungarian palace, Esterháza, was to recess the windows a few feet into a nook. Arup found that the sound bounces off the walls of this cranny, ignoring the window, thus removing the harsh echo of the glass from the sound pattern. Our one large window follows that design.

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We further copied the exact dimensions of the Esterházy’s Hungarian “Haydnsaal.” It replicates the “divine ratio” which was used in the Parthenon, the Acropolis, the inner chamber of the Great Pyramid at Giza in Egypt, the temple of Apollo at Didyma, and the interior of the Mayan ziggurat of Chichen Itza. Mies van der Rohe and Le Corbusier used the formula, as did his disciple, Josep Lluís Sert, who designed la Fondation Maeght.

Debussy, Satie, and Bartók adapted it for music.

When you hear a Haydn quartet played in the Olivier Music Barn at Tippet Rise, it sounds exactly the way it would have to Haydn and Prince Nikolaus Esterházy.

The rests Haydn puts into his quartets decay to silence in the Barn in a perfectly measured amount of time before the next measure begins. The Barn thus copies the sound Haydn heard between 1766 and 1790, when he wrote most of his 80 string quartets (as well as many of his symphonies) at Esterháza. Although it was called the Versailles of Hungary due to its immensity, Haydn was miserable there. It was built on a swamp near the south shore of the Neusiedlersee, and there was nothing to do if you didn’t hunt.

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The great novelist Mervyn Peake lived for a while next to the walls of the Castle of Sark, on which he modeled Gormenghast Castle, the real hero of his great Gormenghast Trilog y. His description of it is more Esterháza than Sark, a monstrosity in the middle of nowhere, on the edge of an endless sea, with its “shadows of time-eaten buttresses, of broken and lofty turrets, and, most enormous of all, the shadow of the Tower of Flints. This tower, patched unevenly with black ivy, arose like a mutilated finger from among the fists of knuckled masonry and pointed blasphemously at heaven.” Esterháza was of course elegantly Viennese, in the Classical style, but its delicate Renaissance lintels and aedicules weren’t enough to hide its brutalist medieval bones.

The piano I’m playing was named Seraphina by its mentor, Tali Mahanor, the legendary technician of Lincoln Center, who discovered and renovated it. It is an 1897 Steinway D, from an era when strings were tuned unevenly. It was made the year Brahms died.

Most grand piano notes are produced by using three identical strings for added power for the majority of the notes. In 1897 and before, the strings weren’t tuned exactly together, to allow for what Tali calls the “zingy-zang,” that frisson, or shudder, or shimmer of harmonic fuzziness, where pitches swirl around in the air before finally deciding on their identities. This gives their notes a gossamer sheen, a luster, a burnish, the way a diamond dazzles from a dozen facets.

This is how Brahms would have heard his music. Not the later laser-focus of a hardened metallic attack from a modern Steinway, but the soft, gaslit innuendo of a foray in the direction of a note, surrounded with the banter and buzz of an evening concert in a coffee house, Thonet chairs and elegant, marble tables topped with Sachertortes, environments beloved by the great architects, playwrights, and poets of Austria: Broch, Adler, Herzl, Schnitzler, Zweig, Freud, Schiele, Klimt, Loos, and, of course, Brahms.

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To capture the sound of the ancient (but beautifully rejuvenated) piano in the resonant hall, six microphones were suspended above the piano, using what is called the Decca tree, made up of three mics and then two and then one forming a pyramid, which the great recording company Decca used to record the golden age of opera in the ‘50s and ‘60s. These mics are DPA 4006 omnidirectionals, renamed from B & K mics after a change of ownership. They are suspended about five feet out from the piano rim and about nine feet up in the air.

Two more Schoeps microphones live up higher and face the rear of the hall, to capture to room ambiance. The last two mics are Neumann omnidirectional tube mics down by the Steinway’s rim, like a drunken lounge lizard lazing by the piano in a cocktail bar, to capture cozier nuances of the singing midrange. Neumann tubes have been used over many decades to replicate the warm gamut of the human voice. They only hear so high and so low, as our ears do, and have a slope of diminishing sound which parallels that of the human ear. They have the same frailties people do, and so the sound decays from them as it does from our ears. They don’t sound as clinical and overly bright as technically better microphones, which are too good for our mortal ears. The sounds picked up by tubes are more distorted and down to earth, just the way the ear hears them.

DPA mics are slightly more modern, and thus noise free, with a sharper curve which hears notes higher and lower than we do, and thus present a more perfect world than the ancestral notes of Mozart or the Freudian lapses of Brahms prepare us for.

Seraphina was restored and prepared by Tali, who came up to Tippet Rise for several epic visits.

Mike Toia, our resident technician, has maintained Seraphina ever since, along with our other instruments and many of our neighbor’s pianos as well. The nuance of one piano’s unique timbre, as compared with that of another piano, is best heard with a converter and headphones. At the end of our list of Frequently Asked Questions is a list of some converters and headphones.

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Concert On the snow-white pages Fingers bleed with cold, Frozen in the ages, Struggling to take hold Of worlds whited-out By the stage’s silent throats, Paralyzed by doubt And disappearing notes, Picks scratching in the night Of a chasm’s hieroglyphics, Suspended thinly on the height Of illusory specifics Left behind like skins To illuminate the keys With discarded fashions And long-dead galaxies.

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Peter Halstead

Peter Halstead is a pianist, photographer, novelist, and poet. He has published seven collections of poetry: Sea Sun, Blinds, Poems of Earth, Face Your Dreams, Postcard Poems, Fluorescence, and Sublimation, with Reflections forthcoming.

Peter co-founded the Adrian Brinkerhoff Poetry Foundation with his wife, Cathy. As Peter says, “Poetry fills in the blanks, the spaces between the lines. It’s the only way to describe things which can’t be described.” Learn more about the Halsteads and their work for poetry and the arts here.

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A partial list of publications: POETRY brinkerhoffpoetry.org Sea Sun Sublimation Light Reflections Word Fugues Paris, Summer Découpage Blinds Poems of Earth Face Your Dreams Postcard Poems BOOKS Tippet Rise: Evolution Fluorescence (with Mark di Suvero) Tippet Rise (Princeton Architectural Press) Into the Window A Winter Ride Bug the Great

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MUSIC (The Pianist Lost series) pianistlost.com “Excesses and Excuses” “Sunken Cathedrals” “Boatsongs” “False Love” “Reply Hazy” “The Gift To Be Simple” FILM The Yeti eBOOKS Fissures in the Snow https://indd.adobe.com/view/fd8e3a47-96bc-436d-b295-d5329e1239bd Snows and Songs and Ghosts https://indd.adobe.com/view/8832c77a-95bc-444e-94ff-69d0aa9a80ba Wind Around the Stars https://indd.adobe.com/view/a34d8d02-f926-4f68-90aa-a56608f1a543 On the Rim of Time https://indd.adobe.com/view/92e9cb20-6ac2-4377-86ab-342f97110040

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Peter studied piano with Russell Sherman in Boston and Irma Wolpe in New York. He studied organ with Charles Courboin at St. Patrick’s Cathedral, New York.

Peter and Cathy are trustees of the Sidney E. Frank Foundation, the Tippet Rise Foundation, and the Adrian Brinkerhoff Poetry Foundation. They are founders of the Sidney Frank Digital Lab in the Rockefeller Library at Brown University, and of Tippet Rise Art Center.

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Technical Specifications Recording Date: 09/17/2018 Recording Engineer: Monte Nickles Assistant Engineer: Jim Ruberto Produced by: Monte Nickles, Peter Halstead Sound Editor: Jim Ruberto Mixed and Mastered by: Monte Nickles

Spot Microphones:

Artist: Peter Halstead Piano: Seraphina

Converters:

Recorded in Auro3D format for immersive playback mixed down to stereo in 32bit 384kHz DXD.

DPA 4006a’s inside piano DPA 4006a’s as A/B Stereo Pair Microphone preamps: Grace M802’s Merging Technology’s HAPI and HORUS with Premium converter cards DAW: Merging Technology’s Pyramix

Microphones used: Main array: Left: DPA 4041a Right: DPA 4041a Center: DPA 4041a Sur L: DPA 4041a Sur R: DPA 4041a Height FL: DPA 4006a Height FR: DPA 4006a Height RL: DPA 4006a Height RR: DPA 4006a

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Flipbook Design and Layout: Craig M. White Photography: Peter Halstead Text: Peter Halstead Pianist: Peter Halstead

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The Tippet Rise Downloads Library FAQ How to play a track

1. Click on the arrow on your chosen track and listen. Many computers after 2016 can play high quality sound.

If no sound

Your computer may not be able to read the chosen track. You can upgrade your sound by adding a converter and headphones (see the lists under FAQs).

Here’s how to attach them to your computer:

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+

+

+

To add a converter and headphones 1. Plug the items in: Computer + USB cable + converter + headphones 2. Double-click on the TRACK you’d like to hear.

3. Go have lunch while it downloads. It could take five minutes to half an hour, depending on

your internet speed.

4. You’ll see the ICON for the track in your downloads window. You can play it from there.

5. If it feels more convenient, drag it to your desktop.

6. Double-click the ICON. You might see a PLAYBACK WINDOW with controls to pause,

stop, play.

7. Figure out how to turn the sound up and down on your computer.

8. Put the SOUND down LOW. 9. Put on the headphones.

10. Push PLAY in the PLAYBACK WINDOW. 11. Turn up the sound until you can hear the music comfortably, on both the converter and

your computer.

(Note that you may have turn up your computer’s sound in its PREFERENCES window

in its SETTIINGS.)

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I can’t hear the tracks that I’ve downloaded.

- Make sure you can hear other things, like YouTube. Make sure the volume is up. Check Settings: Sound.

If you still can’t hear anything, your computer may not be able to play DXD files. You can simply add a converter (see our converter listings below). You can then plug headphones into the converter.

I can’t get the sound loud enough on my computer.

- Make sure the sound bar is all the way up in Setting: Sound, and on your computer dashboard.

If it’s still too quiet, you can simply add a converter (see our converter listings below). You can then plug headphones into the converter. The headphone volume control on the converter will provide excellent volume.

What is the advantage of “high resolution”?

- It sounds like you’re actually there in the room with the musicians in a good recording session.

If it’s a great piano or violin or cello, you can tell.

What are the kinds of high resolution?

- There’s 16/44.1, 24/88.2, 24/96, 24/192, 24/356, 32/384, and 32/768 (the highest). The first number shows the length of each digital “word,” such as 16 bits. The second number shows how many thousand times a second the word “samples” (that is, records) the original sound.

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“44.1” means the track visits the sound 44,100 times a second. 16/44.1 is the measurement (or resolution) of the sound on a CD.

What is a sampling rate?

- The higher the sampling rate, the more accurate the description. The computer actually visits the original master tape as many as 768,000 times a second. This is written 768 kHz (kiloHertz, or a thousand vibrations), as in 32/768.

What is DXD - It’s short for Digital Extreme Definition. DXD is a recording format that uses a very high sampling rate of 24/352.8 to 32/384. Merging Technologies and Pyramix incorporated the DXD format into their workstations to provide a higher standard than was available at that time. Initially it was used as a master file from which lower resolutions were extracted. DXD Data is transferred three times faster than with DSD64, and is eight times larger than a CD’s transfer rate. It has a more exacting sonic response and lower noise than other formats. The Norwegian recording company 2L has pioneered its use and its marketing. The Pyramix System is used by a few high-end studios and symphony orchestras.

Is DXD better than vinyl?

- Originally, performers were recorded in 17 channels by RCA. But no one could figure out how to put more than one channel into the side of each groove. So vinyl became mono and then stereo (two channels). After a few plays, vinyl begins to sound scratchy. It also thumps as the physical vinyl disk wobbles, because the plastic mold warps over time. Dust on the disk causes pops.

DXD has the same warmth as the original master tape, but without the pops, thumps, and scratches of vinyl. It also has the potential to play back as many as 10 channels.

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Are headphones better than loudspeakers?

- A cheap $60 pair of Dr. Dre “Beats” headphones sounds as good as a stereo costing an awful lot. Headphones sound better than speakers generally because their sound goes immediately into your ear, with no friction from the air or from distance to degrade the sound waves. When you sit 10 feet from a speaker, you lose a surprisingly large amount of the sound by the time it reaches you. There are great headphones from Sony, AKG, Sennheiser, Boze, Beyer, B&W. Grado, Focal, Audeze, Stax, Shure, HiFiMan, and Sonoma make more expensive headphones, with diminishing returns.

Can I just plug headphones into my computer?

- Yes. Apple computers can play files up to 32/384. Using the headphone miniplug, just plug in your headphones and hit play on the computer. Other computer brands may need a converter plugged into their USB port (with headphones attached) to play resolutions higher than 24/96.

What is a converter?

- A converter is a unit which converts sound waves from digital modes (which the ear can’t hear) to analogue waveforms (which is what our ears can hear). Digital files, vinyl records, compact disks, DVDs, and Blu-rays need to be translated into the waveforms which our ears hear as frequencies.

The technical term for a converter is a Digital-to-Analogue Converter, or DAC. Today, you can plug a DAC the size of a pencil sharpener into one of the ports of your computer and then plug headphones (or speakers) into that DAC.

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- Many headphones sound just fine by themselves. Other kinds require a boost in volume.

Many DACs have amplifiers in them, so you just plug and play.

Is there a difference in quality between cheap and expensive DACs? - Not always. For instance, the iFi Nano “LeDAC,” for $139, can handle files up to 384 kHz. You can spend thousands of dollars for a DAC with the same chip and the sound will be exactly the same.

What is a “chip”?

- A chip is a minuscule wafer with wires in it. The wires form an integrated circuit, which conducts electricity. Sometimes wires aren’t full conductors, like copper, but can be made of very inexpensive materials like silicon (sand) or even biomaterials which use human biological material. There are various bands. Sabre chips can make an inexpensive converter sound as good as an expensive one which also uses Sabre chips. Burr-Brown chips, now made by Texas Instruments, are also very good. Different models of these chips are hard to tell apart. The Topping DX7 retrieves more detail from complicated classical files, and thus produces greater depth in the music. Crystal, ESS, and AKM all produce fine chips.

Why are some DACs more expensive?

- Using different materials and different designs of circuits will produce different results, so you pay for the “room” or the configuration in which the chip is seated, not the chip. For instance, a moderately sized engine in a Tesla or a Lexus will produce faster acceleration than a Ferrari, because an electric motor has no gears and thus no friction to slow it down.

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How can I hear multichannel sound?

- Headphones and cellphones can produce only two channels of sound for our two ears. But a stereo system or a home theater nowadays may have five or more speakers to create the effect of being surrounded by sound.

Is multichannel sound better than stereo?

- Two stereo channels over headphones can capture so much accurate and deep sound that you don’t need a room with a dozen speakers. That being said, if you have guests for dinner, the most practical way to listen to music or a movie is to have a stereo system so everyone can hear at once.

If you have more speakers, the music seems to come from everywhere, rather than just one point. This creates the psychological effect of being in the original hall where the music was recorded. The music vibrates more, and is thus more “reverberant” or “resonant.”

What about room sound?

Curtains, rugs, and couches absorb sound. Concrete walls and floors make sound bounce back and thus reflect sound, although they can be harsh sounding. If your room has a nice balance between being absorptive and reflective, then your speakers will sound better. Too much furniture absorbs too many frequencies. Cement walls echo too much. So you need to compromise, and have a room that is well “tuned,” or “balanced.”

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Then you need good amplifiers with the same power on every speaker, and good speakers.

Speakers are mostly directional, so the chairs have to be in the “sweet spot,” where all the frequencies come together. The incredible sound from DXD surround makes it worthwhile, if you want to feel like you’re in the original hall.

But is an expensive stereo better than headphones?

- $70 headphones and a good $140 DAC will sound as good, if only one person is listening.

Can two people listen on headphones at the same time?

- Yes. You can buy a “splitter,” which splits the signal to two different sets of headphones. Some headphone amps and DACs come with two jacks for two sets of headphones.

Can I hear high resolution on my mobile phone?

Apple phones can play “FLAC completely lossless,” “ALAC uncompressed lossless,” and “AIFF lossy” codecs. But this requires fast bandwidth transmission speeds. Apple Music transmits at 256 kbps (thousand bytes per second), so that any cell phone can play Apple’s streams.

Deezer Premium, Spotify, Slacker, Tidal Premium, and Google Play require 320 kbps. Napster requires 320 kbps for the ideal quality in streaming its files. Pandora requires 300 kbps for the best results. But you can have mediocre results at 150 kbps.

Deezer Elite requires 5 mbps for FLAC files, and 10 mbps for multiple FLAC streams.

Tidal HiFi requires 1.411 mbps.

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Can I use a DAC on my cellphone?

- The Apple “Lightning to USB 3 Camera Adapter” has a built-in lightning port, which works on Apple cellphones.

Are there other kinds of formats for high resolution?

- There’s Sony’s DSD, or Direct Stream Digital, which uses a “Delta Sigma” waveform, which is digital, but strangely has the same shape as a similar audio wave. SACDs use this DSD format.

The wave shapes we use aren’t DSD, but PCM (pulse-code modulation), which we feel conveys more dynamic range and accurately conveys sudden shifts in volume, such as a sudden drum beat or a lunge at the piano during a Beethoven sonata.

Many of the DACs recommended below also read DSD high-resolution files, which many people prefer for their smoothness.

Here is an incomplete list of some converters that I’ve run across which provide high resolution and cost below $1,000: themasterswitch.com has up-to-date listings for all sorts of audio components, such as speakers, amps, and DACs. Audiolab MDAC Nano ($195) 32/384 kHZ Audio Adapter HD ($199) 32/384 Resonessence Herus ($350) 384kHz FiiO Q1 Mark II ($100) 384kHz TEAC NT-503 ($899) 384kHz 90 Brahms in the Mountains

Chord Mojo Portable DAC ($579) 768kHz iFi Audio xDSD ($399) 768kHz iFi Nano iOne DAC ($199) 384kHz iFi Micro iDSD Black Label ($599) 768kHz iFi Nano iDSD Black Label DAC and Amp with MQA ($199) 384kHz iFi xDSD Portable DAC Amplifier with Bluetooth ($409) 768kHz, MQA, DSD 256 iFi Nano iDSD LE DAC ($139) 384kHz iFi Nano iDSD DAC ($199) ifi Micro DAC2 ($379) 384 kHz Optoma NuForce High-Res Mobile uDAC5 ($199) 384kHz Cambridge Audio DacMagic Plus ($349.99) 384kHz Pro-Ject Pre Box S2 Digital Preamplifier and DAC ($399) 768kHz Pro-Ject DAC Box S2 Plus ($249) 768kHz NuPrime uDSD USB DAC ($179) 384kHz  HEADPHONES AKG K240 semi-open pro studio headphones ($69) Sennheiser closed open-back studio headphones ($150) Sennheiser HD 202 II Professional Headphones ($139) Sennheiser HD200 Pro Headphones ($68) Grado SR80e Prestige Series Wired Open Back Stereo Headphones ($99) Audio-Technica ATH-M30x Pro Monitor Headphones ($76)

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Brahms in the Mountains Essays, Photography, and Music Peter Halstead

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